Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum

Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum
by Brooke Davis Anderson, Michel Thevoz

Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum
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Book Summary Information

Author: Brooke Davis Anderson, Michel Thevoz
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2001-12-01
ISBN: 0810913984
Number of pages: 128
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams

Book Reviews of Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum

Book Review: Darger Retrospective
Summary: 5 Stars

This was published to go with the large Henry Darger retrospective in New York and has all the great drawings (which are huge) reproduced. Darger had such a unique vision and there is so much detail in his artwork. Is he a genius? Yes!

Summary of Darger: The Henry Darger Collection at the American Folk Art Museum

When Henry Darger died in 1973 at the age of 81, he left behind an astonishing cache of art, shocking in both its content and its sheer size. The trove included massive, multi-volume illustrated manuscripts, double-sided nine-foot-long watercolor murals, photo-enlarged tracings, and hundreds of sketches. Depicting a turbulent world, these works are the product of the fertile yet tormented imagination of a secretive Chicago janitor who has since been recognized as one of the supreme self-taught artists of the 20th century.

Cataloguing in full color the American Folk Art Museum's recent acquisition of 37 paintings, among other Darger works, this informative yet affordable volume offers a general introduction to a controversial self-taught artist.


Sweetly colored, pleasingly composed, and delicately rendered, Henry Darger's scroll-like paintings of armies of transsexual children have had a cult status since they were first shown in 1997 at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. The museum's paintings are part of a vast series illustrating the artist's 15,000-page story about the rescue of naked abducted children by seven little girls. Darger, a reclusive janitor and self-taught artist with ambivalent feelings about religion, spent his childhood in a Catholic orphanage, and in the years before his death in 1973 attended Mass several times daily. The real virtues of this slender book are the 114 full-color illustrations of the paintings, which range from fanciful nature scenes to gruesome battle images. The chief essay, by Michel Thévoz, is a pretentious effort that treats Darger's startling and wholly original pastiche of images drawn from magazines and coloring books at a fastidious arm's length. --Cathy Curtis

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